The Heart Goes Last comes first … Margaret Atwood.
Photograph: Murdo Macleod for the Guardian

Margaret Atwood’s dystopian vision of the future The Heart Goes Last has won the Canadian author the Red Tentacle award for the most “progressive, intelligent and entertaining” novel of the year.

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwood review – rewardingly strange

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Wearing a tentacle fascinator, Atwood accepted her Kitschies award in London last night. Her novel, in which a couple living in their car accept an offer to join the Positron Project, which gives them a home of their own in exchange for spending every second month in a prison cell, beat titles by authors including Adam Roberts and NK Jemisin to take the £1,000 prize. On Twitter, Atwood pronounced herself “thrilled” to have won her “huggable Red Tentacle”.

The Kitschies, set up to “reward the year’s most progressive, intelligent and entertaining works that contain elements of the speculative or fantastic”, are in their seventh year, with former winners ranging from Ruth Ozeki and China Miéville.

Judge and novelist James Smythe said that “even as part of an incredibly strong shortlist, The Heart Goes Last felt like an astonishing achievement”.

“It’s an unsettling view of a future that – like so many of Atwood’s novels – feels all too prescient. Funny and devastating and wonderful, we all loved it,” added Smythe.

Patrick Ness: ‘You’re 10, a refugee in a foreign country. What the hell do you do?’

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The Black Tentacle, for “outstanding achievement in encouraging and elevating the conversation around genre literature”, was awarded to “the genre community, personified by Patrick Ness”, for its response to the refugee crisis. Last year, Ness began fundraising for Save the Children because “I’m tired of just tweeting my despair about the current refugee crisis that the UK government is responding to with inhumane feebleness”. He promised to match funds raised by the public up to £10,000, and fellow authors were quick to join him, with almost £700,000 raised in total.

The Golden Tentacle for best debut, worth £500, went to Tade Thompson’s Making Wolf, the story of a London supermarket security guard who travels home to Nigeria, where he is kidnapped and forced to investigate the murder of a local hero. Judge Nikesh Shukla described it as a “strong, strange political thriller that oozes with one-liners and thrills galore”, saying that “with such a strong shortlist that gave us mermaids, fallen cities, people waking up a different race and more, Making Wolf manages to excite and entertain in equal measure”.

The Kitschies, sponsored by Fallen London, also saw the Inky Tentacle for best cover won by designer Jet Purdie for the cover art for Sally Gardner’s The Door That Led to Where, while the Invisible Tentacle for “natively digital fiction” went to Life is Strange, by Square Enix Studios.

“The Invisible Tentacle shortlist runs the gamut of what is possible in digital storytelling, from AAA console games with eight-figure budgets, to spontaneous narrative happenings on Twitter. It was an amazingly strong list, from a really good year,” said judge James Wallis. “We finally chose Life Is Strange for its updating of what a point-and-click adventure can be, with a great cast of characters, excellent writing, an intriguing rewind-time mechanic that drives a plot which refuses to go where you expect, and a level of immersion that challenges the player without putting off newcomers to interactive stories.”